Tech

Write4net Offers Blogging for the Casual Writer

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Quick Pitch: Write4net is a solution for those people that publish content casually. They don't have a blog or personal website but every now and then they want to write a review, share an opinion or publish their thoughts.

Genius Idea: While many of us in the social media space are neck-deep into blogging or building websites, most people aren't. Yet while they don't maintain their own blog or tweet 20 times a day, they do want to have their thoughts heard. If they see a great movie, they want to publish their opinion to others. But setting up accounts and getting readers isn't an easy affair.

Write4net helps fill this gap by making publishing a blog post via RSS and Twitter simple. It's just as simple, if not simpler, than comparable services Tumblr and Posterous. Write4net doesn't require any sign ups or any email addresses. Instead, it just requires a Twitter account.

Now you might be asking why does it need my Twitter account? The answer is that it uses your Twitter as the basis for publishing. This is essentially your "account" on Write4net, and how users can follow everything you cook up.

So what does Write4net actually offer in terms of publishing? Well, while Write4net's strength is absolute simplicity, it does come with features that make it possible to create formatted, video and image-rich articles if you so choose. Pick a title, add a hashtag, upload images, and use their simple syntax to add the images, bold words, or embed a YouTube video.

The end result? Something like this test post that I just made. It works well, is very shareable, and is easy to create. Yet it still leaves something to be desired. Competitors like Posterous and Tumblr are about the same in difficulty, but have vanity URLs (i.e. mashable.tumblr.com), and we wish Write4net had a preview feature to ensure that images and videos actually appear as they should.

Though for the person who just likes to write quick thoughts and doesn't care to own a personal blog, Write4net is an easy-to-use option.

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